It also can be used to treat athsma, which can be life-threatening. In the event of an emergency attack, two cups of coffee can save your life (talk to your doc about it if you have athsma, just to get a sure dose, because i'm tiny so my dose is much lower. If you're big or have a tolerance, it may be higher.) You might not sleep that night, but you'll be alive.
I've always had really bad asthma and this is quite true. The principal is rather simple too. Caffeine increases your blood pressure and will get more oxygen to your brain. It's the same principal as steriods (which are the preferred treatment for asthma attacks).
If you've developed code on your free time, then you should just be required to receive management approval (to make sure the project you're submitting to doesn't compete with your company).
Of course, make sure to avoid using company emails and other necessary precautions.
If it's being submitted by the company, then it should carry the copyright of the company, and your management needs to make the decision to submit it. Remember, it is not your decision to submit code to anyone that you don't own.
It's actually a whole new series of Business PCs called ThinkCentre. Yes, they are available here in the states (and I actually remember seeing a figure ~$600 for the Linux models). The M50 is the only model thus far to be running Linux. Here's the blurb from the press release:
"IBM also today introduced the ThinkCentre M50, with enhanced support for Red Hat and SuSE Linux. The M50 provides stability and manageability for the enterprise and is available with three improved mechanical designs."
This press release is on the front of IBM's main page on the very bottom under Press Releases. This is from about 2-3 weeks ago (surprised it took/. so long to catch on).
On a fragmented disk, the read head has to run all over to collect all of a file's scattered body parts. It takes significant time compared to reading the entire file at a single crack. It's more noticeable on slower systems with slower HDs (to the point that you can actually time the effects, hence become aware that gross fragmentation can reduce performance by as much as ~70%). But just because you don't notice it so much on your 3GHz box with super-fast new HDs doesn't mean you shouldn't defrag newer systems too.
Fragmentation shouldn't be noticable 90% of the time. Let's take a look at common usages of the filesystems:
1) exe, dll loading In windows, executables are mmap'd and therefore loaded on demand. With a generous amount of read-ahead, it would be rare to be reading much more than a couple pages at a time. Given this, as long as the fragmentation isn't so bad that you're blocks are 40k could not be found. As for reducing stability, well, unless IE has some secret access path to the filesystem, that just makes absolutely no sense.
Are you familar with the placebo effect? Perhaps you only _think_ that things are more stable because you mistaken believe defragging is useful.
Try doing full rez video captures to a fresh 20GB drive filled to 80% capacity; you'll be lucky to even grab a minute or two before dropping frames.
This is not what a normal is doing though when they claim their system is slow though. Having 20% disk space on a 20GB drive (i.e. 4GB) is _far_ more than enough for 99.9999% of desktop users out there.
The fact of the matter is, the reason most users think their computer is getting slower is because of the tons of crap they've installed on it (most of which decides to start up whenever a logs in).
This is deceiving. It's technically just configuring Samba as an NT4 PDC. A Win2k "primary" domain controller is a much more complicated beast that doesn't actually work yet (well, sort of, but not really).
This is something that serious ergs me as so many people believe it. The amount of available free space does not affect system performance or stability in anyway shape or form. Your system will run just as well with 10MB of free space verses 10GB of free space(*). The only time you should ever be affected is when trying to write more data than you have. Even writes are not faster with more disk space except in usual circumstances since writes are buffered by the operating system.
(*) These numbers are true on Unix but less true on Windows. Depending on your type of file system, you should have either 2*RAM free or 2*RAM rounded up to the nearest power of two available (for fat or ntfs respectively). For some stupid reason, swap space is stored in a regular file system by Windows (instead of in it's own partition on Unix) so it is possible to run out of memory more frequently if you have less disk space available in Windows (although keep in mind that running out of memory is not that same as slow performance).
They want to have the cable companies to combine with the telephone company and game companies and assign everyone a unique ID.
Ya know, a business case is always gonna look good if you're advocating a total media monopoly. Yes, if one company controls every possible communications mechanism we have, they will make lots of money.
This is an evil idea. Regulatory committees exist solely to prevent this from ever happening as it would destroy our way of life.
If you are an older person with the same level experience as someone fresh out of school (in a particular domain), you are much less hirable regardless of profession. Why? You're value as an investment has dimenished greatly. If you are going to be collecting retirement in 20 years, why would I hire you verses someone who won't for another 40 years? Chances are, if you're just getting into something at age 40, you're not going to do anything that changes the industry.
If you're older and have experience, well, that's a different story entirely. Mostly depends on why you're making a career change.
Generics The new Java generics are really weak compared to C++ template support. This is probably partially due to difficult in compiler support and also complexity (templates are without a doubt the most complex feature of C++). I was disappointed though in Java generics mainly due to lack of any kind of specialization support and also about the strange paradigm used for Iterators (instead of an iterator being class defined with a consistant interface, it's an external class that just behaves that must wrap a behavior around the class).
Enhanced for loop This is for_each() in C++. Now, with for_each, you have to use function objects which is arguable as to whether it's more readable. Fortunately, Boost has developed a boost::lambda class that allows for code to be used as the third parameter. This is _really_ neat.
Autoboxing/unboxing I presume this means that primatives can't be used in generics.. That's kind of sad. This isn't a problem in C++.
Typesafe enums This would be a nice linguistic pattern to have in C++. As it stands, the equivalent would be:
Static import This can be achieved via using in C++. Of course, Java doesn't even really have a namespace paradigm so it's not really a fair comparision.
Metadata This is.. well.. strange. I didn't see the syntax for doing something like this. If it is just keyword/code replacing, then an #include directive would work just as well.
The Samba team got a hold of this about a week ago. These benchmarks are a little off.
For instance, they're comparing Win2k3 vs. Samba 2.2.7. We're rather close to the 3.0 release of Samba and the 2.2 base hasn't really been worked on in a long time.
Moreover, RHAS is actually slightly older than RH8.0 (a lot older than RH9.0). That's why the one benchmark with all three systems showed RH8 beating RHAS. I believe that RHAS didn't ship the O(1) scheduler.
I've also heard claims that the real reason behind the difference in throughput was the poor software raid used in the benchmark machines. Had a supported hardware RAID been used, things would have been pretty different.
Not to mention the "tuning" done to the two systems. The socket buffers were tweaked and the file descriptors increased on the linux side while a bunch of strange registry options were set on the Windows side. There could have been a lot more tuning done on the linux side to improve performance.
Of course, what would you expect from a study commissioned by Microsoft. What someone should do is let the Samba team set up a machine and some Microsoft folks set up another machine. Then we'll see who outperforms who.
How is this any different from having a global kerberos server that everyone authenticates to and then includes a signed checksum of the email message using ticket data.
Almost sort of sounds like.... Passport!
The rose doesn't smell so sweet when it bears the name Microsoft does it?
Why is it that when some chick and dude get some stupid idea to make them famous, spend $50 bucks on a domain name, and post a website,/. has to carry it?
A futher exploration of the mind/body problem. This movie "enforces" the notion that all physicality is part of the mind -- they are not parallel or intertwined. Neo's ability to reform the Matrix is a great device for this -- "there is no spoon" indeed. But is the spoon, then, bent just for him, or for everyone? How might the computer resolve divergent internalizations, interpretations, and mental images? Surely there is a large piece of perception that lies well outside the computer's reach of sensory input -- can't people get out of sync?
This is an interesting point but the problem can be avoided if one separates the observation of an individual and the results of his observation. The individuals all observe the same reality and each of their individual actions affect that one reality.
Syncronizing multiple realities just seems like a total waste of resources (what a waste of memory).
You have no understanding of how symbolic links work.
If you really think this is such a problem, use hard links!
You're making claims out of your ass that "kernel filesystem" needs to be rewritten simply because you don't understand the difference between hard links and soft links.
Congradulations, your stupidity has caused me to no longer read comments on slashdot.
In general, compilers are just not smart enough for these sorts of architectures yet. Give them time to mature.
Interleaving is perhaps the most difficult thing I've had to do as a programmer. It requires really strong math skills and an extremely strong understanding of the architecture itself.
You have to more or less be both a mathematician, a chip designer, and a software developer to properly optimize. I'd be willing to wager that the most important CS problems to be solved in the near future are interleaving algorithms.
The epic architecture is flawed in the sense that it can not run anything not in parrallel without having optimizations lost.
I don't think you really mean parrallel:-) I think what you're referring to is interleaving.
Compilers that support interleaving can achieve parrallelism up to the number of stages on the pipeline (something ridiculus ia64 like 13 or something).
Now of course, if a compiler can optimize for interleaving without programmer intervention, a JIT can optimize for interleaving.
because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
Yes, and if these folks aren't citizens of this country, then the constitution doesn't apply to them.
Besides, a private business can do whatever it pleases with regards to discrimination. Monster.com can make an arbitrary rule against who's allowed to post resumes.
That is quite a different set of circumstances than your analogy presents. No one likes to be misquoted. DFSG would not, as represented by the parent article author, protect anyone from misattribution abuse.
The same applies to software though. In fact, I've been in many a circumstance where someone begins yelling at me because of a bug in my code when it turns out it's really someone elses code (or code someone else added to my code).
Does this mean that all of my code should be #if 0'd out so that everyone knows that I didn't contribute the bugs?
It's silly in software and it's silly in written word.
Either you're trolling, or you don't understand the issue.
I think you're missing the issue here to be honest. The idea that one needs invariant sections isn't new. In fact, the original BSD license allow for an invariant section to protect the owners name from being removed. This led to the "obnoxious advertising clause" as the RMS so likes to describe it that wasn't so bad when it was one line long but was absolutely horrific in NetBSD when it became 75+ lines lone because of all the contributors.
The same applies to the GFDL. What happens after a document has been passed around a bit and has 75+ invariant sections? To publish the work as a book would require an entire chapter devoted to the damn sections. Now what if this was only one page "crib notes" document? Kind of silly isn't it?
The FSF is being incredibly hypocritical as they've blasted the original BSD license and now have incorporated the "obnoxious advertising clause" into one of their licenses. It's quite disgusting...
It is clear that while the GFDL is not up to par with the "Free" philosophy, the DFSG prohibits authors from exercising their right to protect their personal views and speech from modification. This right--to protect your personal views and expression (which source code is not, by the way)--is just as important to free speech as the freedoms outlined in the GPL.
What constitutes a personal view? Obviously, whether I like Bush or not is a personal view but what about the fact that I prefer LL(k) parsing to LALR(1) parsing? If I right an LL(k) parser for a compiler shouldn't I be able to protect others from changing it to an LALR(1) parser because it's my personal view that LL(k) is better than LALR(1)?
You're analogy can be extended to source code because source code is a medium of expression (as determined in Junger v. Daley). Therefore, you're argument is fatally flawed.
If you really want to think, read J.S. Mill's On Liberty. Mill presents an argument that almost everything is simply personal opinion.
I just went to a talk given by RMS here in Austin at SxSW where RMS spoke on copyright.
For at least half of the talk, he spoke regarding the history of copyright and was absolutely boring at all hell (perhaps it's because I only have Lessig's Free Culture talk to compare to).
For the second half of the talk, he began to outline how he thinks the copyright office should work (he admits this isn't a perfect system, but he thinks this is how it should be). Essentially, he narrowed down all intellectual works into three catagories:
Functional These are works that serve some sort of functional use within society. This includes text books, manuals, and software. These works should be free as in speech.
Biographical These are works that are compliations of a particular authors opinions. RMS thought these could go either way. Maybe they could have a limited period of monopolistic power (of course no longer than 2 years).
Aesthetic These are works that only have aesthetic value (in other words, they are the shiny things of the world). Stallman stated that a copyright system should allow a 2-3 year monopoly on such works (this means the RIAA could still do all it does but that you'd be allow to trade songs that were 3+ years old).
Now, I believe there are some major holes in this, but I brought up the point that software licenses surely are functional works within society and therefore the GPL license itself (the actual document that you include with your software) should be free as in speech (it currently disallows derivative works).
Stallman had no answer for this and instead spent 15 minutes explaining to me why using the term "Intellectual Property" meant that I couldn't even begin to understand the issues at hand.
I've always been a defender of Stallman but I lost an awful lot of respect for him that night. I fully support Debian in this matter.
"Who's working on polishing up that ActiveDirectory and Kerberos stuff so I can continue to use my samba based PDC with WinXP."
A goodly number of us actually (myself included).
"There's nothing that can be done about it, it's his time, his decision. Still, it sure would be nice for samba to be a full member of a Windows 2000 domain."
Tridge has already implemented AD member support (and yes, a samba server can be a full member of a Win2k domain). The things holding us up from Win2k DC support have nothing to do with Samba or SMB but with LDAP (mostly schema at this point but we had to wait for a new-plugin mechanism in OpenLDAP called SLAPI) and Kerberos (if you think staring at SMB packets is painful, Krb5 packets are a thousand times worse...).
Right now, the rewrite is the best thing tridge could be working on.
We've talked about doing this a lot. The work tridge's doing is actually quite complimentary to this.
The biggest gain Samba could get from kernel-level stuff would be by an NT-like filesystem that supported proper NT ACLs, was case insensitive, and support unicode natively. Unfortunately, the samba right now only likes to be on top of Posix like filesystems. We need a bit of an overhaul before we can begin to take advantage of kernel-level improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
It also can be used to treat athsma, which can be life-threatening. In the event of an emergency attack, two cups of coffee can save your life (talk to your doc about it if you have athsma, just to get a sure dose, because i'm tiny so my dose is much lower. If you're big or have a tolerance, it may be higher.) You might not sleep that night, but you'll be alive.
I've always had really bad asthma and this is quite true. The principal is rather simple too. Caffeine increases your blood pressure and will get more oxygen to your brain. It's the same principal as steriods (which are the preferred treatment for asthma attacks).
If you've developed code on your free time, then you should just be required to receive management approval (to make sure the project you're submitting to doesn't compete with your company).
Of course, make sure to avoid using company emails and other necessary precautions.
If it's being submitted by the company, then it should carry the copyright of the company, and your management needs to make the decision to submit it. Remember, it is not your decision to submit code to anyone that you don't own.
It's actually a whole new series of Business PCs called ThinkCentre. Yes, they are available here in the states (and I actually remember seeing a figure ~$600 for the Linux models). The M50 is the only model thus far to be running Linux. Here's the blurb from the press release:
/. so long to catch on).
"IBM also today introduced the ThinkCentre M50, with enhanced support for Red Hat and SuSE Linux. The M50 provides stability and manageability for the enterprise and is available with three improved mechanical designs."
This press release is on the front of IBM's main page on the very bottom under Press Releases. This is from about 2-3 weeks ago (surprised it took
On a fragmented disk, the read head has to run all over to collect all of a file's scattered body parts. It takes significant time compared to reading the entire file at a single crack. It's more noticeable on slower systems with slower HDs (to the point that you can actually time the effects, hence become aware that gross fragmentation can reduce performance by as much as ~70%). But just because you don't notice it so much on your 3GHz box with super-fast new HDs doesn't mean you shouldn't defrag newer systems too.
Fragmentation shouldn't be noticable 90% of the time. Let's take a look at common usages of the filesystems:
1) exe, dll loading
In windows, executables are mmap'd and therefore loaded on demand. With a generous amount of read-ahead, it would be rare to be reading much more than a couple pages at a time. Given this, as long as the fragmentation isn't so bad that you're blocks are 40k could not be found. As for reducing stability, well, unless IE has some secret access path to the filesystem, that just makes absolutely no sense.
Are you familar with the placebo effect? Perhaps you only _think_ that things are more stable because you mistaken believe defragging is useful.
Try doing full rez video captures to a fresh 20GB drive filled to 80% capacity; you'll be lucky to even grab a minute or two before dropping frames.
This is not what a normal is doing though when they claim their system is slow though. Having 20% disk space on a 20GB drive (i.e. 4GB) is _far_ more than enough for 99.9999% of desktop users out there.
The fact of the matter is, the reason most users think their computer is getting slower is because of the tons of crap they've installed on it (most of which decides to start up whenever a logs in).
And fragmentation is the #1 reason why DOS/Win boxes slow down over time.
This is just not true! Please, give one reason why fragmentation could ever slow down a computer.
This is probably computer myth number one as far as I'm concerned.
This is deceiving. It's technically just configuring Samba as an NT4 PDC. A Win2k "primary" domain controller is a much more complicated beast that doesn't actually work yet (well, sort of, but not really).
This is something that serious ergs me as so many people believe it. The amount of available free space does not affect system performance or stability in anyway shape or form. Your system will run just as well with 10MB of free space verses 10GB of free space(*). The only time you should ever be affected is when trying to write more data than you have. Even writes are not faster with more disk space except in usual circumstances since writes are buffered by the operating system.
(*) These numbers are true on Unix but less true on Windows. Depending on your type of file system, you should have either 2*RAM free or 2*RAM rounded up to the nearest power of two available (for fat or ntfs respectively). For some stupid reason, swap space is stored in a regular file system by Windows (instead of in it's own partition on Unix) so it is possible to run out of memory more frequently if you have less disk space available in Windows (although keep in mind that running out of memory is not that same as slow performance).
They want to have the cable companies to combine with the telephone company and game companies and assign everyone a unique ID.
Ya know, a business case is always gonna look good if you're advocating a total media monopoly. Yes, if one company controls every possible communications mechanism we have, they will make lots of money.
This is an evil idea. Regulatory committees exist solely to prevent this from ever happening as it would destroy our way of life.
Your situation doesn't apply universally. I work for IBM and having folks who have been with the company for more than 25 years is quite common.
In fact, if someone stays on for 5 years, statistically, they're with IBM for the rest of their life.
If you are an older person with the same level experience as someone fresh out of school (in a particular domain), you are much less hirable regardless of profession. Why? You're value as an investment has dimenished greatly. If you are going to be collecting retirement in 20 years, why would I hire you verses someone who won't for another 40 years? Chances are, if you're just getting into something at age 40, you're not going to do anything that changes the industry.
If you're older and have experience, well, that's a different story entirely. Mostly depends on why you're making a career change.
Generics
The new Java generics are really weak compared to C++ template support. This is probably partially due to difficult in compiler support and also complexity (templates are without a doubt the most complex feature of C++). I was disappointed though in Java generics mainly due to lack of any kind of specialization support and also about the strange paradigm used for Iterators (instead of an iterator being class defined with a consistant interface, it's an external class that just behaves that must wrap a behavior around the class).
Enhanced for loop
This is for_each() in C++. Now, with for_each, you have to use function objects which is arguable as to whether it's more readable. Fortunately, Boost has developed a boost::lambda class that allows for code to be used as the third parameter. This is _really_ neat.
Autoboxing/unboxing
I presume this means that primatives can't be used in generics.. That's kind of sad. This isn't a problem in C++.
Typesafe enums
This would be a nice linguistic pattern to have in C++. As it stands, the equivalent would be:
struct Coin { enum { penny, nickel, dime, quarter }; };
Static import
This can be achieved via using in C++. Of course, Java doesn't even really have a namespace paradigm so it's not really a fair comparision.
Metadata
This is.. well.. strange. I didn't see the syntax for doing something like this. If it is just keyword/code replacing, then an #include directive would work just as well.
The Samba team got a hold of this about a week ago. These benchmarks are a little off.
For instance, they're comparing Win2k3 vs. Samba 2.2.7. We're rather close to the 3.0 release of Samba and the 2.2 base hasn't really been worked on in a long time.
Moreover, RHAS is actually slightly older than RH8.0 (a lot older than RH9.0). That's why the one benchmark with all three systems showed RH8 beating RHAS. I believe that RHAS didn't ship the O(1) scheduler.
I've also heard claims that the real reason behind the difference in throughput was the poor software raid used in the benchmark machines. Had a supported hardware RAID been used, things would have been pretty different.
Not to mention the "tuning" done to the two systems. The socket buffers were tweaked and the file descriptors increased on the linux side while a bunch of strange registry options were set on the Windows side. There could have been a lot more tuning done on the linux side to improve performance.
Of course, what would you expect from a study commissioned by Microsoft. What someone should do is let the Samba team set up a machine and some Microsoft folks set up another machine. Then we'll see who outperforms who.
How is this any different from having a global kerberos server that everyone authenticates to and then includes a signed checksum of the email message using ticket data.
/. has to carry it?
Almost sort of sounds like.... Passport!
The rose doesn't smell so sweet when it bears the name Microsoft does it?
Why is it that when some chick and dude get some stupid idea to make them famous, spend $50 bucks on a domain name, and post a website,
Next
A futher exploration of the mind/body problem. This movie "enforces" the notion that all physicality is part of the mind -- they are not parallel or intertwined. Neo's ability to reform the Matrix is a great device for this -- "there is no spoon" indeed. But is the spoon, then, bent just for him, or for everyone? How might the computer resolve divergent internalizations, interpretations, and mental images? Surely there is a large piece of perception that lies well outside the computer's reach of sensory input -- can't people get out of sync?
This is an interesting point but the problem can be avoided if one separates the observation of an individual and the results of his observation. The individuals all observe the same reality and each of their individual actions affect that one reality.
Syncronizing multiple realities just seems like a total waste of resources (what a waste of memory).
I cannot believe how stupid you are.
You have no understanding of how symbolic links work.
If you really think this is such a problem, use hard links!
You're making claims out of your ass that "kernel filesystem" needs to be rewritten simply because you don't understand the difference between hard links and soft links.
Congradulations, your stupidity has caused me to no longer read comments on slashdot.
I can't believe how bad it's gotten...
In general, compilers are just not smart enough for these sorts of architectures yet. Give them time to mature.
Interleaving is perhaps the most difficult thing I've had to do as a programmer. It requires really strong math skills and an extremely strong understanding of the architecture itself.
You have to more or less be both a mathematician, a chip designer, and a software developer to properly optimize. I'd be willing to wager that the most important CS problems to be solved in the near future are interleaving algorithms.
The epic architecture is flawed in the sense that it can not run anything not in parrallel without having optimizations lost.
:-) I think what you're referring to is interleaving.
I don't think you really mean parrallel
Compilers that support interleaving can achieve parrallelism up to the number of stages on the pipeline (something ridiculus ia64 like 13 or something).
Now of course, if a compiler can optimize for interleaving without programmer intervention, a JIT can optimize for interleaving.
because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin;
Yes, and if these folks aren't citizens of this country, then the constitution doesn't apply to them.
Besides, a private business can do whatever it pleases with regards to discrimination. Monster.com can make an arbitrary rule against who's allowed to post resumes.
That is quite a different set of circumstances than your analogy presents. No one likes to be misquoted. DFSG would not, as represented by the parent article author, protect anyone from misattribution abuse.
The same applies to software though. In fact, I've been in many a circumstance where someone begins yelling at me because of a bug in my code when it turns out it's really someone elses code (or code someone else added to my code).
Does this mean that all of my code should be #if 0'd out so that everyone knows that I didn't contribute the bugs?
It's silly in software and it's silly in written word.
Either you're trolling, or you don't understand the issue.
I think you're missing the issue here to be honest. The idea that one needs invariant sections isn't new. In fact, the original BSD license allow for an invariant section to protect the owners name from being removed. This led to the "obnoxious advertising clause" as the RMS so likes to describe it that wasn't so bad when it was one line long but was absolutely horrific in NetBSD when it became 75+ lines lone because of all the contributors.
The same applies to the GFDL. What happens after a document has been passed around a bit and has 75+ invariant sections? To publish the work as a book would require an entire chapter devoted to the damn sections. Now what if this was only one page "crib notes" document? Kind of silly isn't it?
The FSF is being incredibly hypocritical as they've blasted the original BSD license and now have incorporated the "obnoxious advertising clause" into one of their licenses. It's quite disgusting...
It is clear that while the GFDL is not up to par with the "Free" philosophy, the DFSG prohibits authors from exercising their right to protect their personal views and speech from modification. This right--to protect your personal views and expression (which source code is not, by the way)--is just as important to free speech as the freedoms outlined in the GPL.
What constitutes a personal view? Obviously, whether I like Bush or not is a personal view but what about the fact that I prefer LL(k) parsing to LALR(1) parsing? If I right an LL(k) parser for a compiler shouldn't I be able to protect others from changing it to an LALR(1) parser because it's my personal view that LL(k) is better than LALR(1)?
You're analogy can be extended to source code because source code is a medium of expression (as determined in Junger v. Daley). Therefore, you're argument is fatally flawed.
If you really want to think, read J.S. Mill's On Liberty. Mill presents an argument that almost everything is simply personal opinion.
For at least half of the talk, he spoke regarding the history of copyright and was absolutely boring at all hell (perhaps it's because I only have Lessig's Free Culture talk to compare to).
For the second half of the talk, he began to outline how he thinks the copyright office should work (he admits this isn't a perfect system, but he thinks this is how it should be). Essentially, he narrowed down all intellectual works into three catagories:
- Functional
- Biographical
- Aesthetic
Now, I believe there are some major holes in this, but I brought up the point that software licenses surely are functional works within society and therefore the GPL license itself (the actual document that you include with your software) should be free as in speech (it currently disallows derivative works).These are works that serve some sort of functional use within society. This includes text books, manuals, and software. These works should be free as in speech.
These are works that are compliations of a particular authors opinions. RMS thought these could go either way. Maybe they could have a limited period of monopolistic power (of course no longer than 2 years).
These are works that only have aesthetic value (in other words, they are the shiny things of the world). Stallman stated that a copyright system should allow a 2-3 year monopoly on such works (this means the RIAA could still do all it does but that you'd be allow to trade songs that were 3+ years old).
Stallman had no answer for this and instead spent 15 minutes explaining to me why using the term "Intellectual Property" meant that I couldn't even begin to understand the issues at hand.
I've always been a defender of Stallman but I lost an awful lot of respect for him that night. I fully support Debian in this matter.
"Who's working on polishing up that ActiveDirectory and Kerberos stuff so I can continue to use my samba based PDC with WinXP."
A goodly number of us actually (myself included).
"There's nothing that can be done about it, it's his time, his decision. Still, it sure would be nice for samba to be a full member of a Windows 2000 domain."
Tridge has already implemented AD member support (and yes, a samba server can be a full member of a Win2k domain). The things holding us up from Win2k DC support have nothing to do with Samba or SMB but with LDAP (mostly schema at this point but we had to wait for a new-plugin mechanism in OpenLDAP called SLAPI) and Kerberos (if you think staring at SMB packets is painful, Krb5 packets are a thousand times worse...).
Right now, the rewrite is the best thing tridge could be working on.
We've talked about doing this a lot. The work tridge's doing is actually quite complimentary to this.
The biggest gain Samba could get from kernel-level stuff would be by an NT-like filesystem that supported proper NT ACLs, was case insensitive, and support unicode natively. Unfortunately, the samba right now only likes to be on top of Posix like filesystems. We need a bit of an overhaul before we can begin to take advantage of kernel-level improvements.